A researcher from the University of California Santa Barbara says he has traced the existence of an astronomer in Chichen Itza between AD800 and 1000 who beat Nicolaus Copernicus to his famous discovery.

But among the bright but complex mix of symbols and pictures are clues to an ancient knowledge of the solar system that superseded by centuries Nicolaus Copernicus’ famous ‘discovery’ that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

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Only 20 codices from the ancient Central American cultures are known to have survived. Those that do provide a tantalising insight to their history, dynasties and achievements.

And soon we’re about to get a taste of some more: Advanced image scanning is recovering text long thought lost from the pages of history.

Pages depicting the Venus table from the Dresden Codex.Source:Supplied

HEAVENLY DECREE

One of the few Mayan surviving codices, the Dresden Codex, has fascinated historians for centuries.

It’s an ancient encyclopaedia of astronomical observations.

But new interest has been directed towards just one of its panels: the Venus Table.

University of California Santa Barbara professor of anthropology Gerardo Aldana argues in a new journal article that its meaning has been misinterpreted.

“It’s all the blinders that we have, that we’ve constructed and put in place that prevent us from seeing that this was their own actual scientific discovery made by Mayan people at a Mayan city,” he said in a university press statement.

Until now, the Dresden Codex’ Venus Table was thought to simply be a page calculating the phases of the planet as it passed between the Earth and the Sun.

Aldana says a multidisciplinary look at the work — combining elements of both astronomy and archeology — reveal a new side to the hieroglyphics.

“They’re using Venus not just to strictly chart when it was going to appear, but they were using it for their ritual cycles,” Aldana explains. “They had ritual activities when the whole city would come together and they would do certain events based on the observation of Venus. And that has to have a degree of accuracy, but it doesn’t have to have overwhelming accuracy.”

So why go through all the trouble of some pretty advanced maths?

The Observatory, El Caracol, part of the city of Chichen Itza. Did a Mayan astronomer working here figure out from watching Venus that the planets revolve around the Sun?Source:Supplied

THE VENUS CODE

His paper, titled Discovering Discovery: Chich’en Itza, the Dresden Codex Venus Table and 10th Century Mayan Astronomical Innovation, has been published in the Journal of Astronomy in Culture.

In the 1930s it was realised the codex contains a ‘mathematical subtlety’ which allowed for the irregular timing of Venus’ cycle around the Sun: 583.92 Earth days. It’s a fraction of time which can rapidly accrue into serious error for observers of the heavens.

So the Mayans calculated and introduced the equivalent of a ‘Venus leap year’, similar to how our calendars are adjusted by a day every four years.

It treated Venus as though it circled the Sun.

“We’re looking at the work of an individual Mayan, and we could call him or her a scientist, an astronomer,” Aldana says. “This person, who’s witnessing events at this one city during this very specific period of time, created, through their own creativity, this mathematical innovation.”

He pinpoints the discovery to the city of Chich’en Itza, and says it was likely made under the rule of K’ak’ U Pakal K’awiil.

Codices from pre-conquest Central America are incredibly rare, but offer our best insight to their complex culture.Source:Supplied

BETWEEN THE LINES

Aldana makes the assumption that the page of the codex contained more than just a numerological record of Venus’ phases. It was also contained evidence of an historical record.

“Let’s assume that they had historical records and they were keeping historical records of astronomical events and they were consulting them in the future — exactly what the Greeks did and the Egyptians and everybody else. That’s what they did,” he says.

These records, of course, have long since been lost.

Instead, Aldana matches a time when the phases of Venus would have been uniquely visible to astronomers in the city of Chichen’Itza between AD800 — 1000.

“If … you say ‘This is based on a historical record,’ that’s going to nail down the range of possibilities,” he says. “And if you say that they were correcting it for a certain kind of purpose, then all of a sudden you have a very small window of when this discovery could have occurred.”

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Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus stumbled over the Venus problem some 500 years after the Mayans. He was trying to predict the dates Easter fell on far into the future.

His calculations led to the revelation that the planets revolved around the Sun. This went against all conventional wisdom which perceived — through direct observation — the celestial bodies engaging in a complicated spiral dance around the Earth.

It was a simple and elegant revelation.

But did the Mayans beat him to it?

“I don’t have a name for this person, but I have a name for the person who is probably one of the authority figures at the time,” Aldana said. “It’s the kind of thing where you know who the pope was, but you don’t know Copernicus’s name.”

Now a freshly discovered codex is promising to cast new light on a little known culture.

Pages 11 and 10 verso of the Codex Selden. The top image shows the pages as they are now after being scraped in the 1950s. Centre is one of several different scans of the page and bottom is the reconstructed text. Pictures: The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Arch. Selden.Source:Supplied

EXPOSING HISTORY’S PAGE

A new codex dating from before the colonisation of the Americas has been revealed after spending 500 years masked by plaster and chalk, and used as a binding for a later manuscript known as the Codex Selden/Codex Anute.

Now researchers from the Universtiy of Oxford and institutions in the Netherlands have used advanced imaging techniques to read what had been feared to be long since destroyed.

Their discovery has been published in the Journal of Archaeology: Reports.

The Codex Selden is a 5m long strip of deer hide coated with white plaster and folded into a 20-page document. It dates from about 1560AD.

In the 1950s it was suspected the codex was a palimpsest: an older document that had a newer layer of text applied.

So researchers scraped away part of the plaster to reveal ghostly images of the older writing.

No further work was done until now for fear of destroying both works.

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The makeup of the codex does not absorb X-rays, making it difficult to peer beneath the plaster.

What researchers have found is one of just five known documents from the Mixtec/Oaxaca culture in Mexico.

‘After 4 or 5 years of trying different techniques, we’ve been able to reveal an abundance of images without damaging this extremely vulnerable item,’ says Ludo Snijders from Leiden University.

‘What’s interesting is that the text we’ve found doesn’t match that of other early Mixtec manuscripts. The genealogy we see appears to be unique, which means it may prove invaluable for the interpretation of archaeological remains from southern Mexico.”

So far seven pages have been imaged. One shows a scene similar to others which show a king with his council, though this example is unusual in that women are also depicted.

Others have pictures of men with spears and women with red hear among glyphs naming rivers.

It’s hoped ongoing scanning of the remaining pages will allow greater interpretation.